You need to know about Video Games

Okay, maybe you don’t, but it is becoming a more and more common medium in our society (yes, facebook games and Papa’s computer solitaire both count) and I, dear family, am the reporter for the job.

E3 happened last week. The Electronic Entertainment Expo. It’s essentially a big media event for the games that are coming out over, theoretically, the next year. Most of the games shown there are still things that won’t trickle down past people like me, but there is some more general, interesting news that you might want to hear about.

-Microsoft is putting out a new peripheral for their video game system. It’s called Kinect. It’s essentially a body scanner, it’s supposed to be able to read the position of your entire body in real time. The games associated with this new technology are still in an early development stage, but the technology is promising. If this sort of control scheme makes sense, we may be controlling computers ‘Minority Report’ style sooner than you think. Or not. It may turn out to be a huge waste of time, too. That’s what the future is for!

-3D DS. I’m guessing everyone knows about the Nintendo DS at this point, or at least you can visualize what I’m talking about when I mention it. Well Nintendo is rolling out a new version that has a 3D screen. Presumably what this means is that it knows where your face is and can send one TV image to each eye. The feedback from the people that have actually tried it is that it’s really quite good.

This is important for another reason, too. Remember how the big thing for the past several years has been ‘HD TVs’. The big, flat-panel ones that everyone was buying? Well the new wave of TV technology is 3D TV. That’s right, people, 3D is back! Or at least, major TV manufacturers are betting that it’s the next big thing. You can get 3D TVs right now if you want, but, once again, the technology is pretty new and you have to wear dorky glasses in most cases. Also it gives some people headaches. But who knows? In a few years it’ll either be like DVDs (how did we ever manage before everything was in 3D?) or like Laser Disks (Man, that was a dumb idea.)

I got a new wedding ring. I’m still hovering around between 200 and 205 pounds (trying my best to lose more) but my wedding ring keeps almost falling off, especially when my hands get wet. So I got a new ring, a half-size down. It’s made out of tungsten and it’s pretty freakin’ huge. Looks neat, though. And it’s big and obvious, which I think Jessie likes because she’s always afraid someone is going to discover how great I am and try and move in on her milkshake. She likes that I have this lady-repellent on my hand.

I’m mostly just excited that I got a cool new ring and that I’m all skinny now. Relatively. I still look pretty huge in that trapeze video.

Oh, yeah, recovery from the trapeze class has been pretty rough. Jess has been SUPER sore for the past couple of days, while I have been less achy. At least my hands have recovered pretty well. Great exercise, but not something we could do every day. I had to skip Judo on Monday (well I didn’t *have* to, but I did) and Jess wasn’t even able to go skating yesterday. We’re both back to something like normal today, though. At least now when people come to Austin and ask ‘what is there to do?’ we have another thing we can recommend.

-N